Just two decades ago, the prevailing orthodoxy was that Europe would “run the 21st century.” The idea was seductive: European ideals and regulatory standards would diffuse globally, creating a world where the European Union—a “normative superpower”—wielded outsized influence not through force, but through example. If those arguments looked credible in the 2000s when the EU accounted for around a quarter of global economic output and was undergoing significant waves of enlargement, today they look outlandish.
Europeans must now confront a harsher reality. Every major Western European economy—Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands—has witnessed its share of global output erode relentlessly over the last 35 years. The decline is clearly structural and ubiquitous.
Their collective economic output has declined from 26.7 percent of the world’s total in 2000 to just 15.4 percent in 2025. Even though much of Central and Eastern Europe, led by a resurgent Poland, is converging with Western European standards of living, the outlook for the EU itself is dire. In 1990, the nine-member community commanded 29.2 percent of global output; by 2025, a 27-member union produced just 18 percent. This represents one of the sharpest declines of any region in modern economic history–the flipside of China’s, and more generally, East Asia’s, rapid rise.
The contrast with the United States is damning. America has defied expectations, holding its share of global output steady over the last 35 years—26.2 percent in 1990 versus 26.1 percent in 2025. The human cost of this is becoming clearer and clearer: Americans are now approximately $31,000 per year richer than their British or German peers. Back in 1990, the three were largely equal; today, they are in different economic spheres.
As economic scale dwindles, geopolitical gravity follows. But much of the current weakness of the key European powers is self-inflicted. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the major European powers slashed their defense budgets. Reductions in military spending in the heady 1990s was understandable, but the cuts continued to mount well into the darkening 2010s, with even France and the United Kingdom cutting capabilities to historic lows.
The result is a geopolitical vacuum in Europe, particularly along the continental fringes. Weakened and distracted, Europe has become a hunting ground for the CRINK. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea now prey on the European periphery, revising the very international order that Europeans, along with the United States, helped to build. Even Washington now views this weakness with thinly veiled contempt. Rather than running the 21st century, European countries have begun to play catch up, and they are running the danger of becoming the board for others’ geopolitical games.
Europe to the Rescue
Confronted by domestic stagnation and the rising threat of the CRINK, a familiar chorus argues that the EU should finally transform into a geopolitical pole—a superpower capable of protecting common interests. Such calls, however, are as unworldly as they are unlikely to bear fruit.
First, the EU is strategically truncated. It no longer includes the United Kingdom—a nuclear-armed state with the most powerful navy, cyber capabilities, and intelligence services in Europe, as well as one of the largest and most sophisticated defense research and industrial bases. Often seen as an obstacle to a coherent European foreign and defense policy before Brexit, Britain’s departure appears to have made little difference to the EU’s ability to secure its objectives. Despite the “ReArm Europe” plan and a plethora of other strategic initiatives, the EU has failed, again and again, to mobilize a collective will to power. During the early phases of Russia’s lunge into Ukraine in 2022, it fell to the UK and the US to shore up Ukrainian defenses.
Second, American (and British) power and attention, which helped underpin continental Europe after the Second World War, is now being refocused onto the Western hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific. Facing the encroachment of Chinese influence into its own backyard—from the Caribbean to South America—Washington is prioritizing its home theater over commitments to the Old World. While the US retains an interest in Europe, it is no longer the primary theater. US President Donald Trump, while driving this change, is probably the last American president who will have lived experience of the Cold War. The next president may have little emotional connection to Europe, and their successors even less. Europeans need to work harder to maintain their strategic relevance.
Stopping Europe’s Strategic Torpor
As the geopolitical and geoeconomic forces behind the old order in Europe crumble, European strategic torpor cannot go on. If it does, Europe may become to the 21st century what the “Third World” was to the 20th: a playground for external powers to settle scores to avoid direct escalation in their home theaters.
We have received a glimpse of this over the last four years with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Kremlin’s aggression has transformed into a global proxy war. Iran, North Korea, and China have all projected power into the heart of Europe in ways that were inconceivable only a decade ago—providing Russia with everything from long-range strike drones and diplomatic cover to defensive manpower.
To stem this tide, Europe requires a vision more exclusive than the broad churches of NATO and the EU. This new architecture must be a “coalition of the capable,” open only to those nations prepared to pay the price of integrated defense and with willpower sufficient to outmaneuver, or even overwhelm, their rivals.
The New Centrality of the UK and Germany
In the previous century, the British and Germans fought one another to shape the destiny of Europe. In the 21st century, the two countries would do well to join forces. The logic is one of raw capability: They are the continent’s two indispensable economies, a dominance they look set to entrench. Their “complementary toolsets” offer the only viable framework for a durable European security architecture. By 2030, the strategic weight of Germany and the UK will not only align but significantly outpace that of their neighbors (see the chart on the next page).
Economically and militarily, the two nations now tower over their European allies. With a combined GDP exceeding $11 trillion, their joined economic yield is only surpassed only by the US and China. If European affairs in the late 20th century were driven by a Franco-German motor, the volatile terrain of the 21st requires the higher torque of a British-German engine.
However, values, culture, and even complementary toolsets are not firm foundations for grand strategy. Alliances built on sentiment tend to whither; those built on necessity endure. The key question is not whether the UK and Germany like one another, but whether they need each other. Additional questions then remain: Do Berlin and London share the same interests? And can they forge a common interest between them? A calculated assessment of geopolitical realities is needed, where geostrategic cooperation is driven not by historical affinity, but by the cold necessity of mutual survival.
It could be argued that in terms of interests, the UK and Germany are very different. One is a maritime and nuclear power with global financial and strategic interests; the other is a continental state, larger in terms of population and industrial output, but with a center of gravity rooted firmly in continental Europe. Historically, London has looked out to the oceans, while Berlin has looked across the European plains.
Then there is the EU: Germany was a key initiator of the project alongside France, while the UK was never strongly attached, and eventually withdrew. Both Germany and the UK have been strongly Atlanticist, but Britain’s historical links with its Anglosphere offshoots, such as the US, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, complicate its European focus. And until recently, the UK and Germany saw Russia very differently: London has long been wary of the Kremlin, while Berlin embraced Russia to gain access to cheaper energy.
But, today, the two countries find themselves with fused strategic horizons: Russia’s attempt to dismantle the Euro-Atlantic order is a threat so profound that they must work together. Painfully, Germany has severed much of its reliance on Russian hydrocarbons, just as the UK has surged back to the European continent to shore up the eastern front. The division of labor is now clear and potent. Germany’s revitalized land forces will become the anvil of NATO’s central front, while Britain’s naval and air power—especially through Operations Atlantic Bastion, Shield, and Strike—provides the hammer along NATO’s northern and southern flanks. Both now seek to deny hostile actors undue influence in Europe, just as they seek to maintain order around them. This is perhaps the most important element. Here, their interests and capabilities align: British force projection, naval power, and nuclear weapons dovetail with Germany’s military buildup and focus on the central front.
How to Lead
If they are to lead in Europe in the 2030s, the UK and Germany will need to refresh both their strategic software and the hardware on which it runs. The trajectory is already set: The two signed the Trinity House Agreement in October 2024 to put in place the technical dimension of defense, while the Kensington Treaty of July 2025 binds the two together for the longer term. John Healey and Boris Pistorius, the two nations’ defense ministers, have also cooperated closely to lead the Ukraine Defense Contact Group since the Americans relinquished that role shortly after the inauguration of President Trump.
Yet, London and Berlin should go deeper and faster. Their explicit geostrategic aim should be to shape the arc that stretches from Greenland to the Black Sea. It is here where the British-German geopolitical engine, alongside capable and willing European allies, should enforce a “zone of denial” to deter Russian incursion and exclude hostile interference.
This mission serves a dual purpose: It holds back the CRINK, but it assures the Americans. By demonstrating sufficient strength to protect the North Atlantic and High North, London and Berlin can prevent the need for preemptive—and potentially destabilizing—American interventions. In effect, this “zone of denial” would intersect with the US National Security Strategy’s “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, offering America a secure outer layer of defense without requiring its direct involvement.
Both Britain and Germany are deeply wedded to NATO, but the alliance needs to evolve to survive. For decades, calls for a “European pillar” were rightly dismissed by London and Berlin as Trojan horses for transferring defense competencies to the EU. With Washington focused on the Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific, the time for such a pillar has now come. However, it cannot be a clumsy grouping of all EU and/or NATO European states. The UK has already laid the foundations with the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF)—an agile rapid response capability designed to confront sub-threshold threats. While Germany has historically been absent from the JEF due to constitutional brakes on the use of force, a solution exists. Germany and Poland could be integrated as “associate partners”—a model successfully trialed with Ukraine in 2025. This would pave the way for a formalized minilateral vanguard with Britain, Germany, Poland, Romania, and Turkey, united with the JEF to implement the strategy of denial across the Greenland-Black Sea arc.
Finally, London and Berlin need to master the art of escalation dominance. For too long, revisionist powers, such as Russia, have disrupted the Euro-Atlantic order by exploiting the predictable caution of the European powers. To break this cycle, Germany and the UK should embrace calculated risk to redefine the regional security architecture, rather than wait for adversaries to dictate terms. The tragedy of Ukraine, as well as Moldova and Georgia (perhaps even Greenland) has been their abandonment in a “gray zone”—a strategic vacuum that has invited aggression.
Counterfactuals are painful but necessary: Had the British and German governments provided lethal aid to Ukraine, backed by in-country advisors, and fortified Kyiv after 2014, the calculus in Moscow might not have unfurled in the way that it did. Had the deterrent forces of today’s Coalition of the Willing been deployed preemptively in consultation with the Ukrainian government, the cost of invasion would have been visibly prohibitive. While history cannot be rewritten, the future can be secured by recognizing a fundamental truth: Power abhors a vacuum, and if the UK and Germany do not fill vacuums around Europe, their CRINK rivals have shown that they will not hesitate to do so.
Credible Coercive Power
Leadership demands leverage, and for Britain and Germany, leverage requires rapid rearmament. Yet, on this critical front, both are already lagging: While Berlin has locked in a trajectory to hit 3 percent of GDP by 2030, the UK’s commitment is deferred to the next parliament (2029–34)—a timeline that risks obsolescence before it even begins. The logic is unforgiving: Without a surge in military capacity, the British-German engine stalls. Neither country will be able to reinforce the other, let alone forge a European group capable of extracting respect from partners and commanding fear in rivals.
A failure to rearm would provide the CRINK with an open invitation to become more aggressive. Far from running the 21st century, without credible coercive power, the UK and Germany will struggle even to secure their own continent.
James Rogers is co-founder and director of research at the Council on Geostrategy.
